i took an herbal metabolism 'helper' before eating last night - ha ha, i thought, what with all the coffee i drink, i'll be able to see through walls. horrible, horrible nightmares about dying friends all night - i was crying in my sleep, for christ's sake - and such tremors and chills this morning that i stayed home from work. now i have the flu. being an idiot is frustrating.

i took this body image psych study my sophomore year - hey, two units - and sat around on a bean bag chair with these poor girls who were obsessed with their breasts. at one point we had to write letters to our most hated parts: dear butt, you are huge and i want to destroy you. then we wrote responses from the parts: kimmy, you eat ice cream when you're sad. is that my fault?

Shortly before her scheduled graduation, concurrent with the end of her first pregnancy and TM's first recording sessions, Kristin Hersh enrolled in an art therapy seminar on relaxation. "I thought, 'Great, I need to relax alright.' And they were all drawing these animals to help them relax. So I drew this little blue blowfish with a horn on it. Everyone else had drawn these unicorns in these beautiful lush forests. We were supposed to be drawing an animal that represented us, and I had this ridiculous-looking little thing lost in the middle of this huge page.

"Everyone was going, 'Kristin, that makes me feel so sad. It's like you have no environment. Don't you feel grounded in any way?' And I thought, 'Yeah, I feel like an abandoned blowfish.' So I didn't graduate. It's the last thing I ever did in college."